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Trump’s sharpened focus on investigating elections raises fears of midterm meddling
- States Newsroom
- 3 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Jonathan Shorman
Stateline
President Donald Trump was speaking to supporters at a Pennsylvania rally June 23 when he made an extraordinary admission about an election a continent away.
Trump and his allies had spent several days in June savaging California over its slow vote counting and baselessly alleging its contests were fraudulent. But now the president divulged that his actions went beyond just public criticism.
“I called up the very powerful, very good U.S. attorney in California and I said, ‘Do me a favor, take a look, they’re trying to steal that election, too,’” Trump recounted.
Over the past six months, the Trump administration has focused the power of federal law enforcement — and even a top U.S. intelligence official — on elections and discredited grievances over the president’s 2020 loss.
In January, the FBI raided an elections facility in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots. FBI agents are probing the 2020 election in Milwaukee and subpoenas have gone out to officials in Arizona. The Department of Justice demanded to see Detroit-area ballots and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed it took voting machines from Puerto Rico. The FBI searched the offices of an Ohio voting rights group in June.
Democrats, election experts, former federal prosecutors and others say the administration’s actions raise deep concerns about whether the White House will use groundless investigations to disrupt the November midterm elections. They say Trump’s recent acknowledgment that he personally directed a federal prosecutor to examine voting in California only underscores their fears.
“The notion that a president or anybody in the White House calls up the U.S. attorney’s office, certainly on our end, would have been considered, I think, completely inappropriate,” said Stephen McAllister, who served as the U.S. attorney in Kansas during the first Trump administration.
Shattering a norm
After Watergate, the Department of Justice built a reputation for independence from the White House. While presidents nominated DOJ leaders and set broad priorities for the department, they were expected to steer clear of specific investigations. The norm was tested during the first Trump term but didn’t entirely break.
By contrast, the second term has shattered it, creating a clear path for the president to act on his false claims of stolen elections, according to individuals who have worked in the Justice Department and critics of the Trump administration. Growing evidence, they say, points to Trump personally intervening in federal law enforcement action on elections — or top officials getting the message and acting accordingly.
“I think the focus and the direction is whatever the president wants, and I think this is wrong,” McAllister, now a law professor at the University of Kansas, said of the current Justice Department.
“The DOJ, especially post-Watergate, there were a lot of things done to try to strengthen it as an institution that could stand up and protect, defend the rule of law,” he said. “And this administration has torn so much of it down.”
The California election shows how quickly the Justice Department can take action after Trump makes his views known.
California’s primary election was Tuesday, June 2, but election officials are allowed to take roughly a month to complete vote counting. The lengthy process is a product of the state’s large population, as well as its reliance on voting by mail.
While politicians, including Democrats, have called on the state to speed up its count, the sometimes plodding process isn’t evidence of fraud.
Late the night after the primary, Trump posted on Truth Social that Democrats were trying to steal the election. “Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS,” he wrote.
It isn’t clear which U.S. attorney received the call from Trump or when exactly he placed the call or if it actually occurred. California is divided into multiple federal judicial districts, each with their own top federal prosecutor.
Asked about the call, the White House referred States Newsroom to Trump’s comments and the Justice Department, which didn’t respond to questions.
By the Friday morning after the election, First Assistant U.S Attorney Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, announced that his office had multiple election fraud investigations underway with the FBI. He also dispatched a prosecutor to observe vote counting.
In the days that followed, Essayli gave several interviews with conservative media, including an appearance on commentator Glenn Beck’s show where he predicted criminal cases. “I expect people will be charged,” he said.
After Trump’s comments in Pennsylvania, the office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who frequently clashes with Trump, posted on social media that Trump had “just admitted it.”
“The President of the United States is personally directing federal prosecutors to start investigations into his political opponents when his preferred candidate may lose the election,” the post said.
DOJ pursuing 30 lawsuits on voter rolls
Ahead of the midterms, Trump and other administration officials have shown a high level of interest in how elections are administered.
Last week, the president refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill to pressure the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act, which would implement a nationwide requirement that voters show documents proving their citizenship. In March, he signed an executive order attempting to restrict voting by mail, which a federal judge blocked last week.
The Justice Department has filed 30 lawsuits against states that have refused to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, which include sensitive personal information like driver’s license and Social Security numbers.
The Department of Homeland Security also overhauled a powerful computer program into a system that can search voter rolls for possible noncitizen voters (a judge recently halted use of the reconfigured system).
“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement when asked about Trump’s approach to election-related investigations.
Jackson named several federal laws — including the Civil Rights Act, National Voting Rights Act and Help America Vote Act — that she said give the Justice Department “full authority to ensure states comply with federal election laws, which mandate accurate state voter rolls.”
“This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House,” Jackson said, noting Trump’s support of the SAVE America Act.
Within the Justice Department, criminal investigations involving elections have traditionally been treated with particular sensitivity, McAllister said.
Anything touching on elections needed to be coordinated with the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., he said, adding that there was a lot of centralized control to prevent U.S. attorneys “from just poking around where they shouldn’t be.”
The Justice Department has previously published a manual on prosecuting election crimes on its website, but at some point it was removed without explanation. In June, a group of Democratic senators voiced concern its disappearance could presage attempts to interfere in the midterms. They noted that during Trump’s first term the manual was accompanied by a memo outlining the DOJ’s election non-interference policy.
Robert Weiner, who served in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Biden administration, said the government used to enjoy what the legal community calls the presumption of regularity — the belief among judges that it was acting lawfully. He said courts should not extend that presumption now.
Trump may be trying to impair the ability of local election officials to conduct fair elections and “generally create chaos” that could serve as an excuse to seize voting machines and not accept legitimate election results, Weiner said.
“I am very worried,” said Weiner, who is now the director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocacy group. “I think we have to act on the assumption that bad things are going to happen. That’s not saying that they will. We have to be prepared and able to counter.”
US Senate Dems form task force
Some Democratic states — including California, Colorado, Connecticut and others — have passed new limits on federal election interference. At the federal level, Senate Democrats have formed an election protection task force and announced plans to train their staff members as election observers.
“The president of the United States is clearly laying the groundwork to try to interfere with the midterms and try to undermine confidence in any election results that he is not happy about,” Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, told reporters.
Voting rights advocates fear the FBI’s raid on a Fulton County election facility in January offered a window into what it might look like for federal law enforcement to seize ballots after the November election.
While Trump has long promoted false allegations about voter fraud in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, the raid shocked election experts in part because the FBI obtained a search warrant, meaning a federal judge found probable cause to believe evidence of federal crimes would be found at the election facility.
Fulton County officials vocally condemned the raid and successfully sued to unseal the affidavit used to support the warrant. The 19-page document included previously investigated claims about the 2020 elections and revealed the investigation originated from a referral by Kurt Olsen, an election denier who Trump last fall made a special government employee to look into the 2020 election.
Trump appears to have taken a personal interest in the Fulton County raid. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, was photographed at the scene and later told Congress she was present at Trump’s request. The New York Times reported that she put the president on the phone with FBI agents the next day.
Gabbard left her role in June, but Trump has indicated he wants the new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, to also look into elections. The director of intelligence, a Cabinet-level position established in the wake of 9/11, is supposed to help lead the U.S. intelligence community and has no formal role in elections.
Pulte, who has no previous intelligence experience and previously led the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is known for antagonizing the president’s perceived opponents, including the former Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell and New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James.
“He may find out some things about the rigged elections,” Trump told reporters in early June.
Marisa Pyle, senior democracy defense manager at All Voting is Local Georgia, praised Fulton County officials for aggressively pushing back against the raid.
She said that while she is concerned the search could create a chilling effect among voters and election workers, she has been heartened that it had also motivated some people to sign up to work the polls.
While no one has a crystal ball, Pyle said, she expressed hope that Fulton County’s rejection of federal interference will minimize future attempts.
“I think that’s optimistic,” Pyle said. “I think we prepare as best as we can and we just have to be ready to defend the results.”
• Stateline is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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